| Product: |
Sun at Midnight - Rosie Thomas |
| Date: |
30/05/06 (154 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: A picturesque story in a unique background.
Disadvantages: Weaknesses in charactar formation.
“Rosie Thomas writes with beautiful, effortless prose, and shows a rare compassion and a real understanding of the nature of love”
This was the quote that greeted me within the first page of her book and was made by the Sunday Times, although Cosmopolitan and the Mail on Sunday were less wordy in their assessment of her abilities. I started reading the book with an open mind. It is a story that centers around two main characters, Alice Peel, and a man called Rooker, both finding themselves part of an expedition to the Antarctic, both for different reasons and both having circumstances that pursuaded them to take the decision to go there. The story is about a love affair, in extreme conditions, although giving away much more than that might spoil the enjoyment for the reader. It's about betrayal, and how it makes a human being make decisions that they would not normally take, and leads the reader into imagining which way the love story will turn as it follows the characters on the expedition through events from the "now" and the past.
The book boasts that Rosie Thomas has done her research for this unusual book that takes the reader to a small research station in the Antarctic region, although to me, this is where the research stopped, and in any case in a work of fiction was less important to me than getting the balance of characterizations right. Let's face it, how many readers would note inaccuracies about a polar station or the atmosphere of it ? Taking this premise a step further, what I believe readers would find difficult to associate with is the way in which the characters in the book interacted and reacted, and I was left with the impression that what the writer needed to research more than the Polar region in which the story is based, is honest human emotion, and here she failed miserably.
She's a very readable writer, and the 488 pages were not a chore. Her word flow is good and the lady can tell a story, although not as convincingly as I would have liked. For example, most of the characters of the story are upper crust people with middle class backgrounds. Alice Peel herself is overshadowed by a mother who is a famous scientist, and perhaps too protected by her father, and I suppose one could be lead to believe that the “stuff upper lip” Oxford background of Alice could account for what I found to be a cold read, although I believe that instead of trying to play the part of Alice, the writer should have known that interweaving characters, knowing how they would react in different circumstances, is more important than looking at the story from one angle and getting it wrong.
On explaining the male characters in the book, Rosie seems to have come unstuck, delving into the background of Rooker like walking in the dark, almost as if the writer had no experience whatsoever of anything less than British Middle class background, and not really convincing the reader of the plausibility of the male members of the expedition, whose descriptions and perceived instincts are not natural or flowing, almost as if the writer herself has little understanding of men.
The descriptions of the antarctic were picturesque and I liked this part of her writing very much, because you could feel some part of the writer herself coming into the background and the pictures painted were sufficiently interesting to keep me reading. What I felt was weak was relationships, reactions, consequences and here as the story unfolded, it felt like a soap opera gone wrong, where all the wrong actors and actresses had been chosen.
I could understand the strains that a confined living space with strangers, such as portrayed in her descriptions of life in the Antarctic, would indeed be difficult for people who were sometimes trapped by weather conditions for long periods of time. No-one likes that kind of restrictive day in, day out monotony perhaps or closeness of strangers, although even when characters were taken out of these circumstances and placed in different surroundings, the way in which their stories intertwined was stiff, starchy and somehow over-rehearsed.
The presentation of the book is good and tempting which is why I bought it and it was hailed on the front cover as “The International Bestseller”, although I suspect it was sold based on readers' experience of her earlier works, rather than on its' own merits.
Not put off by the lady's writing style, I think that I may try another book of hers because I like the clarity of her work, but given the choice would never have bought this book new at a price of Six Pounds Ninety Nine, because there are better stories out there at the price. Second hand, it may be a tempting proposition to a reader that wants to step into an Antarctic adventure, and is perhaps not as fussy with their reading as me, although this book disappointed me.
Paperback
Publisher: Harpercollins Pub Ltd (June 30, 2005)
ISBN: 0007173520
Originally printed in 2004 by Clays Limited, St Ives plc.
Also available in Hard cover.
Summary: Disappointingly mundane
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